Skiing in Control - Free thoughts and suggestions from one of Europe's top coaches.

Monthly Archives: May 2017

Skiing technique: mistake #2: Clumsy joint flexing.

Perhaps correct for her exercise but terrible for skiing!

Skiing technique can be practiced at home in your bedroom. I want to return here to my admonition in “Mistakes #1” on posture, find it here. If you have not already read it, I recommend reading that first. Do the simple practices and then come back to this.

This Skiing technique issue of being able to both flex and extend your ankle, knee and hip joints – especially your ankle – is not a peripheral matter. This is absolutely fundamental to your development of skilful skiing. You need to develop skill in this area for your skiing to really give you satisfaction.

Skiing technique : mistake #1: Standing too upright.

Skiing is dynamical in nature. Constantly moving. It is not a series of individual, and separated events but a continual stream of them. More akin to a moving stream than a line of individually separated stones.

The oft-promoted, and oft-accepted idea of being “in balance” is completely wrong. There is never time to be “in” balance; we would have to come to a stop in order to be able to do that. As John Shedden pointed out to me once, if you stand a brick on its end, on a flat level surface, it will be in balance. We cannot ski like that.

Skiing technique requires instead, for our balanc-ing to be of a ‘fuzzy’ nature. So long as we are moving, we will not ever be “in” balance, we will instead be constantly moving towards that: constantly making (often unconscious) movements adjusting to changing circumstances. This is one of the reasons that skiing is difficult. There is much you can do to change this, even while you are at home. Continue reading →

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